Back in March 2010, I had to make a business trip to Germany and Belgium for two weeks, and I managed to arrange my flights so that I flew through London, and spent a weekend visiting my lifelong musical buddy Tim in his place in Kent, England. I brought along an M-Audio FastTrack Pro USB interface and two Audio-Technica AT2020 microphones, which we plugged into Tim's Mac mini and recorded using GarageBand. (The same gear would be used with my work-provided Dell and Ableton Live to record Stuttgart.)

Tim invited our mutual friend Paul to visit, and at one point we were reminiscing about the 6 months when Paul and his partner Bridget came to live with us in Ithaca in my parents house while they were on a sabbatical in Thailand, back in 1987-1988. The recordings from that visit are all on the Warren Road Studios album. I'd mentioned in this 2010 visit how I had all the original lyric sheets and studio notes from those crazy days, and I'd made some mention of coming across some incomplete lyrics of Paul's that had never been recorded, called "I want my Mac back". So, of course, at some point during our reunion jam, we were improvising and I made up these lyrics.

We'd done a hearty two-chord jam prior to this, the aptly named "funky B&E", and so we'd joked we needed to progress to three chords. We ended up being really psyched with the insanely catchy three-bar, three-chord progression. Tim's playing bass, I'm playing Tim's acoustic guitar, and Paul's playing my Martin Backpacker --unfortunately mostly drowned out by my playing and we were basically sharing a mic.

Good times! This and the rest of this weekend session from March 2010 are on the Tim & Andy Band album chimney cats.

Thanks for listening!

-Andy

I want my Mac back

I want my Mac back
gimme it
I want my Mac back
what is this 
piece of crap
that you have made me
do my work on

I want my Mac back
give me my
give me my Mac back
give me my
give me my Mac back

it was so easy, it was
so powerful, it was 
so hard to screw it up
I want my Mac back
I want my Mac back
gimme gimme gimme

what is this DOS box?
I cannot stand
what am I supposed to see
when I 
see the C: 
blinking at me?
I want my Mac back
I want my Mac back
I want my Mac back
I want my Mac back!

Windows 95 ?!?
Windows 98 ?!?
I want my Mac back
Windows 2000 ?!?
Windows ME ?!?
I want my Mac back
Windows XP ?!?
I want my Mac back
Windows Vista ?!?
I want my Mac back

you can put lipstick on a pig
it's still fuckin' DOS under there!
I want my Mac back
gimme my Mac back


lyrics improvised by Andy Wyatt on 5 March 2010
music improvised by Andy Wyatt, Tim Odell, and Paul Tuckey on 5 March 2010
©2010 by The Andy Band